Vivian Swift Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first? (Jane Austin, in a letter to her sister)

September 2009

I was hanging in there with 11 cats, living a reasonably normal life (that is, undetected as a certifiable “Cat Lady”), keeping my two warring factions of indoor cats apart (Belle and Coco can’t stand it that they aren’t the only cats in the house so they live Upstairs separate from the Downstairs cats — I said I had a “reasonably” normal life)…until these two showed up.

Panda there, on the bottom, was a fat little kitten when she appeared two years ago, mewing under the dining room window. We brought her in and discovered that she loves to play fetch with toy mousies.

Cindy Lu, on top, was the saddest little thing I ever saw: 4 months old and weighing only one and a half pounds, she was starving, filthy, sick, cold, frightened, and alone when she showed up on our doorstep last January, probably days away from death. She was a very sick little kitty, and we gave up our trip to New Orleans to pay for her hospital bills — she had an extremely rare lung infection that took months to cure.

I named her Cindy Lu the littlest Who in Whoville because the vet said she was probably going to be a very small cat, her growth stunted because of her health problems; but she is a tubby ten-pounder these days and very bossy (not at all like the Who’s in Dr. Suess after all). It’s that charming butinsky attitude of hers that kept her alive when she was nothing but skin and bones.

And then we got cat # 14:

We call her “The Tipping Point”. Panda and Cindy Lu call her “the one whose life we have to make miserable”.

You should see the way I live, keeping Penelope (above) out of the reach of the two brats who now rule over the household. Even I know it’s gone way past normal. I am undeniably, reality-TV-ily, quintessentially a Cat Lady.

I’ve spent my day working on this illustration for my France book (the part where I shop at the charcuterie for a picnic lunch) and it’s brought back memories from deep, deep down in my past, those dark years in the late 1970s when quiche first came to America. I remember it as a dismal time when burnt orange was the color scheme, polyester was the fabric, Tony Orlando and Dawn were the soundtrack, and Pet Rocks were the “in” joke, but wouldn’t you love to go back to an era when our biggest worry was whether or not real men ate quiche?

What I learned today about living a creative life is that it is very difficult to draw snails in a way that makes them look like they are having fun while looking edible as they bop around the border of a charcuterie illustration. So if you can possibly avoid having to draw snails in any amusing, light hearted fashion, you should by all means do so. It’s not a huge life lesson, but that doesn’t make it any less of a life lesson.

Elaine Stritch, the Broadway actress, once told an interviewer about the one piece of advise that her father ever gave her about life: “Be very careful what you name a horse.”